In the late 1990s, when I was living in Washington, D.C., writing about restaurants, I gave myself a pass when it came time to order dessert during the hottest stretch of summer. The rule was that if nothing on the menu threatened to be as intoxicating as going home to suck face with a juicy-ripe peach over the sink, I would do just that instead.

DAVID GRUNFELD / THE TIMES-PICAYUNELa Petite Grocery pastry chef Bronwen Wyatt, here with her peaches, almond tart and sweet corn ice cream, is experimenting with using nearly all of the peach plant, from the nutty inside of the fruitâÂÂs stone for ice cream to the green leaves from the tree in panna cotta.

The policy didn’t follow me to New Orleans, partly because I had grown tired of making extra trips to restaurants after realizing I had acquired no experience with their desserts. But more than that, it had to do with discovering chefs in the South do things with peaches no normal person would want to skip.

Things like peeling them and packing them in syrup to eventually garnish peach panna cotta, a dessert currently featured at GW Fins, or grilling them to flesh out a slab of crisped pork belly with fresh okra and sweet corn, an example of the fruit’s savory versatility offered up by Restaurant August.

Early this week, I ordered the peach pie at Dante’s Kitchen, a mash-up of intensified natural sugars and buttery crumb that hit many of the same pleasure points as the peach-and-berry cobbler I ate at Borgne in late July. Ralph’s on the Park’s “stuffed peach snow ball” — peach granita studded with peach chunks cushioned by sabayon — similarly brings to mind Hansen’s Sno-Bliz’s cream of peach snowball.

PEACHES ON THE MENU

The chefs’ menus change from day to day, but this handful of New Orleans restaurants makes the most of peach season.

In his book “Ripe,” Nigel Slater succinctly captures the fruit’s aura of possibility: “The peach promises much.” But its omnipresence on menus does not necessarily signify an abundant harvest.

Farmers and distributors who cater to the New Orleans market blame a perfect storm of factors — too-warm winter, too-brief spring and this summer’s one-two punch of record-breaking heat and torrential rain — for dragging down peach yields across the region.

“The man I get my peaches from (in Chilton County, Ala.), he’s been doing this his whole life, and he said it was the worst season he remembers,” said Steve Etter, co-owner of Maravilla Ranch, a produce distributor based in Picayune, Miss.

Danny Jones, owner of Durbin Farms, also in Chilton County, said he sells to several suppliers in the New Orleans area. The warm winter caused his trees to fruit early, forcing him to begin harvesting in late April instead of the more typical mid-May. And where in a normal year Jones sells peaches through September, he figures he’ll run out by mid-August this season.

But Mother Nature has to drum up something harsher than bad weather to wipe peaches from our diets. In late July, Hot and Hot Fish Club, the Birmingham, Ala., restaurant whose chef-owner, Chris Hastings, recently won a James Beard Award, was featuring pickled local peaches on its charcuterie plates. Down the street at Highlands Bar & Grill, chef Frank Stitt’s venerable Beard winner, chefs baked peach upside-down cake.

At Tuesday’s Crescent City Farmers Market, Cherry Creek Orchards sold peaches from Pontotoc, Miss. Tenney Flynn, GW Fins’ chef-owner, uses peaches from South Carolina, which could be seen as heresy given that he’s from Georgia, otherwise known as the Peach State.

“There isn’t very much to recommend South Carolina,” Flynn quipped, winking toward the cross-state peach rivalry, “but the peaches are very good.”

Flynn is fond of using overripe peaches — “They get so soft you just squeeze the pit out of them,” he said — for sorbet, but his native enthusiasm for the fruit extends to savory applications as well. Last weekend, while visiting family, the chef said he ate a “very good” peach-and-ham panini at the Bakery at Cakes & Ale in Decatur, Ga.

By the time you read this story, I hope to have re-visisted Ristorante del Porto in Covington, whose kitchen has been known to grill late-season peaches to adorn pizzas. The restaurant serves a different specialty pizza daily during lunch and small pizzettes at happy hour.

Rusty Costanza / The Times-Picayune ArchiveRistorante Del Porto in Covington creates a new specialty pizza each day for lunch, including ones featuring grilled, fresh peaches.

Of all the local chefs currently making the best of the waning peach season, Bronwen Wyatt may be the most industrious. The La Petite Grocery pastry chef has been roasting Alabama peaches to pair with almond turnovers and sweet corn ice cream for much of the summer. More recently, she’s infused cream with peach leaves to use as the base of a wonderful panna cotta, its flavor closer to that of an almond’s than a stone fruit’s.

“You have to use really young peach leaves,” Wyatt said, pointing out that older leaves tend to be too tannic. The leaves come from Maravilla Ranch and behave like tea, she said, turning the cream “a fresh, bright green color really quickly.”

La Petite’s bar also stocks a small amount of vin de peche, a housemade peach aperitif. Soon, Wyatt hopes to start serving ice cream made from the meat of roasted peach pits. “The meat looks a little like almonds,” Wyatt said. “After about two months, I finally have enough to make a half-gallon” of the ice cream.

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Have you tried any great peach dishes or drinks at New Orleans area restaurants and bars? Tell us about them at Nola.com/dining.